Tuesday Sep 24, 2013

Traditional BPM lifecycle begins with mapping key
organizational processes into a graphical model. Achieving a common
understanding of current process and ideal to-be process requires close
engagement with process stakeholders. For ex: In a call center scenario, manager
of the call center operations would know best how call center handles customer
escalations.

Process stakeholders are motivated to improve processes.
Modeling is just a medium to get there. Hence, once the processes are modeled
and automated, it is imperative that we give these process stakeholders the
required level of visibility into the entire process execution. This visibility
enables them to observe, orient, decide and act (check out “OODA Loop” by John
Boyd).

Different process stakeholders have different visibility
needs.

Real-time visibility – This gives operational users
real-time view into process execution, enable them to identify areas of
bottlenecks and take actions immediately. Ex: In a call center, a call center manager may benefit from real-time
visibility in agent performance, call metrics and use it to distribute call
load evenly.

Historic Visibility – Traditionally delivered with BI, these
dashboards provide historical insight into business performance. BI dashboards
allow business executives to analyze process metrics with contextual data to
detect important business trends. Ex: In a call center, VP of call center would
be more interested how customer satisfaction has been improving over past 6-12
months.

Prescriptive Visibility – Analytics can recommend users to
take certain actions by learning from past and present behavior. This insight
can be very powerful, accurate and alleviate the burden of analyzing data from
the end user. Ex: Call center agent is fielding calls from customers requesting
an increase in credit limit. Dashboard to recommend him to cancel or approve
the request based on customer’s spending history as well as how similar
requests have been handled in the past.

Most vendors only focus on siloed
dashboards and fail to deliver user centric, actionable insights. Its important
that dashbaords deliver unified experience – bring together all aspects of
visibility (real-time, historic, prescriptive) in a seamless fashion and enable
users to make intelligent business decisions.

We have started to see companies bringing together process
management (BPM) and decision making (BI) capabilities to make business
processes intelligent and adaptive. With strong integration between Oracle
BPM Suite, Oracle
BIEE Suite and Oracle
Real-time decisions, you can build dashboards which deliver true business
insights at every level in the organization. These insights help process
stakeholders take decisions and drive process forward. In next few weeks, we
will share an exciting demo which brings this concept of unified business
visibility to reality.

At Openworld 2013 in San Francisco, I was joined by Brigette
Vinton, Director of Corporate Accounting, Alliance Data Systems (ADS) to discuss business visibility in
the session “Achieving
End-to-End Business Visibility with BPM and Business Intelligence [CON8609]”. ADS is a leading provider of marketing, loyalty
and credit solutions. While my talk focused on BI & BPM integration
patterns and a BI+BPM+RTD demo , highlight of the session was Brigette’s talk
on how ADS has streamlined its Capital Expenditure Request (CER) process with
Oracle BPM, Oracle BIEE, Oracle WebCenter and PeopleSoft.

Capital Expenditure Request at ADS is a very human centric
process. Every time requester initiates
a new Capital Expenditure request, it navigates across multiple stakeholders
(accounting, business admin, controller, finance) requiring collaboration,
document management and dynamic approval management.

Oracle BPM Suite orchestrates this entire process. This
enables complete audit trail of the approval process thereby enabling
compliance. All approvals and notifications are mobile enabled. Once the expenditure has been approved, BI
dashboards provide near-real time visibility into actual costs. At any point,
if actual costs of the project exceed the approved budget, BI dashboards automatically
trigger BPM process using Action
Framework. BI dashboards complete the CER lifecycle to ensure project
overspend goes through a review process again. ADS also leverages Oracle
Essbase with PeopleSoft to help business users perform complex “what-if”
analysis to further fine tune the approval decisions.

AVIO Consulting helped ADS with solution implementation. Project
went live in July 2013 and has helped ADS gain visibility in 100+ CERs already.
Going forward, ADS is planning to feed approved CERs into Hyperion Planning
application for forecasting depreciation.

Whether you refer to it as adaptive business process or
business process intelligence, what ADS demonstrated is a classic example of
how the world of process automation, business intelligence and predictive
analytics together enables complete business visibility.